Nate Berkus On Quitting Smoking & How He's Helping Others Do The Same

Instinct Staff | December 30, 2016

Nate Berkus is now a proud ex-smoker and he opens up to PEOPLE about his struggles with his habit.

“There were areas of my apartment that I would go to and it was almost automatic where if I were sitting in my chair facing that view on my computer or opening mail or whatever, I would smoke,” Berkus, 45, tells PEOPLE.

He first picked up a cigarette in high school, and had “smoked on and off” since, but a few years ago, his priorities changed.

“The combination of wanting my health to be better, starting a family and realizing it wasn’t in line with all of the other things that were becoming important to me,” were the inspiration to quit four and a half years ago. “What started as something that was like, ‘oh, all the cool kids are doing it,’ now [made you] a bit of a social pariah if you were excusing yourself from conversation to go have a cigarette,” he says.

It appears Nate's passion for interior design helped him as he made efforts to quit.

“Figuring out how I could see a corner of the room differently led me to doing different things in that space,” he says, adding that little victories can go a long way. “It’s figuring out how can you reward yourself. Is it something as simple as framing a beautiful black-and-white print of a place that you promise you’ll take yourself on vacation if you stick to it? It’s about making little changes that are all in line with that decision.”